Right, but that doesn’t matter in the long run because no ruling against her will stand, because if all else fails, the Trump regime can just appeal it all the way to the Supreme Court and those corrupt and compromised shitweasels will rule in his favor. Probably without explanation.

Unfortunately, “unlawful” no longer matters, because the worst case scenario for the Trump regime is they appeal all the way up to the Supreme Court, and then those corrupt and compromised pieces of shit Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch give them whatever the fuck they want.

That’s part of the thing to me - it is almost as if she’s bored.

I think she’s a pure sociopath - that it’s not that she has some sense of right and wrong and self-servingly chooses to ignore or defy the distinction, but that the concepts don’t even make sense to her - that she genuinely doesn’t even grasp what it is that people are talking about when they refer to right and wrong.

Which makes her almost certainly the most dangerous person in the entire regime. I think she could sign an order to execute a million Americans just as easily as she could sign an order for socks from Amazon.

Perversely, I find Gabbard to be fascinating.

Even among the Trump regime, she stands out for her utter lack of integrity and principles. Unlike the rest, and even Trump himself, it’s not that there’s something small and warped and self-serving where her principles should be, but that there’s nothing at all. There’s just an empty space - a complete and total ethical void.

It really doesn’t matter if they succeed or not.

The Republicans are no longer even bothering to pretend to be at all interested in fair and free elections. They’ve signaled clearly that they will do anything to take and hold power, and honesty, integrity and democratic principles count for nothing at all. So if they don’t succeed this time, they’ll just cheat harder next time.

This isn’t some shadowy conspiracy theory - they’re doing it openly and publicly.

Fair and free elections in the US aren’t under threat - they’re already dead. And that’s not hyperbole - it’s the explicit, official position of the Republican party.

The only direction from here is down.

Nice of them to provide us with a boycott guide.

It is almost impossible to find a business leader who thinks Mamdani would not be highly destructive to the interests of the city.

It’s impossible to find a business leader who gives a shit about “the interests of the city” at all.

The only thing they care about is their own undeserved privilege. They pretend that that’s somehow “the interests of the city” because they’re psychopaths, so to them, they are “the city” and nothing and nobody else counts.

And yes - Mamdani is a threat to their undeserved privilege. And that’s as it should be.

Ah… got it.

Wow.

You might just be on to something there.

I use a lot of psychosexual imagery to describe their relationship, but that’s just because it’s both convenient and, to conservatives, demeaning (and to non-conservatives, amusingly ironic). But even though it consistently conjures up very accurate imagery, I hadn’t really considered the likelihood that that’s because there really is something to it.

He said “they’ll get mad at me”.

Oog. I missed that bit.

And yes - it sounds exactly like what someone would say to an abusive ex with whom they want to get back together.

That’s just plain creepy.

My preferred phrasing is that Trump looks at Putin like a schoolgirl with a crush.

I’m not sure why you start that with a “No” though - I don’t think we disagree.

I said that Putin won’t cede anything to Trump because that’s specifically what he (won’t) do. Yes - he doesn’t overtly shut Trump down - he doesn’t even seem to challenge him much. He’s smarter than that. He knows that Trump is a shallow, emotionally immature narcissist, so he feeds his ego and jollies him along, and counts on Trump being so pleased about being treated like a big boy by his hero/crush that he won’t notice that he isn’t sctually getting any meaningful concessions at all. And it works.

Anybody who expected anything else hasn’t been paying attention.

Trump’s a spoiled little boy pretending to be a big man. As long as he’s surrounded by unprincipled sycophants and other emotionally stunted wannabes, he can get away with pretending to be a big man, but as soon as anyone stands up to him, he folds up.

Putin, meanwhile, fought and killed his way to the top of one of the most fiercely competitive authoritarian systems on Earth. He’s never going to cede anything to a delusional toddler.